First Lines Fridays is a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines?  If you want to make your own post, feel free to use or edit the banner above, and follow the rules below:

• Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page
• Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first (I cheat a little bit here *cough*)
• Finally… reveal the book!

If you’re using Twitter, don’t forget to use #FirstLinesFridays!

---

Hello, reader!

We’ve reached the end of the week, which means it’s time for another First Lines Friday! I have a lot of books that are calling to me right now, so it was hard to pick one I wanted to feature. I decided to go with one of my current library books that I’m very excited to read. It’s also a book on my “12 friends, 12 recommendations” TBR! I haven’t had a chance to crack it open yet, but I’m hoping to pick it up soon.

Now let’s see if the first few lines can make me want to read it even more!

---

The Line(s):

“There’s a smudge of lipstick on the collar of his shirt. She sees it. She says nothing about it. Instead, she stands there, bobbing the crying baby up and down like the needle of a sewing machine piercing fabric.”

---

The Hints:

This is a thriller…

… written by a fairly popular thriller author…

… that involves a disappearance that happened eleven years ago.

---

The Reveal:

Local Woman Missing by Mary Kubica

Click the cover to be taken to the Goodreads page

Goodreads Synopsis

People don’t just disappear without a trace….

Shelby Tebow is the first to go missing. Not long after, Meredith Dickey and her six-year-old daughter, Delilah, vanish just blocks away from where Shelby was last seen, striking fear into their once-peaceful community. Are these incidents connected? After an elusive search that yields more questions than answers, the case eventually goes cold.

Now, 11 years later, Delilah shockingly returns. Everyone wants to know what happened to her, but no one is prepared for what they’ll find….

In this smart and chilling thriller, master of suspense and New York Times best-selling author Mary Kubica takes domestic secrets to a whole new level, showing that some people will stop at nothing to keep the truth buried.

---

Did that first line capture your attention? Did it make you want to read the rest of the story? Let me know in the comments!

And, as always, happy reading!